Amid pennant race, soccer friendly scheduled for Petco Park

With three weeks left in a pennant race, statistically the best pitching staff in baseball will have its mound removed and rebuilt.

For a soccer game?

The Padres confirmed that Petco Park will host an international friendly on Sept. 14 between storied Mexican club Chivas and its American brethren, Chivas USA of Major League Soccer. A news conference is scheduled for this afternoon to make the formal announcement.

“We’re out of town and we had an opportunity to bring soccer to San Diego,” Padres president Tom Garfinkel said. “Anything we can do to bring an event like this to San Diego is great for the city. We know there are a lot of soccer fans in San Diego … and it didn’t get in the way of our No. 1 priority, which is baseball.”

But staging a soccer game on such short notice so close to the playoffs would appear to be curious timing, particularly when it involves removing a pitching mound where baseball’s ERA leaders have allowed 2.88 runs per nine innings at home. Pitchers can be finicky about their mounds — the precise height, depth, angle, even dirt composition.

“We have a great grounds crew,” Garfinkel said. “We have (10) days before our next home game and they’re confident they can put the mound back exactly as it was, so our pitching staff won’t even notice the difference. They’ve researched it. They’ve talked to five different teams about some of the things they’ve gone through and the things they’ve learned.

“We have a lot of confidence it won’t be an issue.”

The downtown ballpark has hosted one soccer game previously, a Mexico-Sweden friendly in 2005 that presented several organizational headaches. And Qualcomm Stadium, where most international soccer games are held, appears to be available. There is just one football game scheduled there between Aug. 21 and Sept. 19, San Diego State’s season opener against Nicholls State on Sept. 4.

In addition, Petco groundskeepers won’t have much time to convert the facility from baseball to futbol. The Padres play a Sept. 12 afternoon game against San Francisco, giving them barely 48 hours to remove the mound and home plate, then sod over the infield and mesh the grass seams with the outfield.

The Padres return from a 10-game road trip on Sept. 24 against Cincinnati.

The soccer game is part of an annual summer and fall tour by Chivas of Guadalajara to the States, where it is widely considered Mexico’s most popular club. The Goats, as they are known, will also play MLS’s Philadelphia Union on Sept. 1.

Chivas USA has faced its big brother only once, a 2-0 win by Guadalajara last September before an announced crowd of 22,879 at the Rose Bowl. The lone appearance by Chivas USA in San Diego was its first-ever game, a preseason exhibition in 2005 against Mexican club Atlante that drew maybe 5,000 to the Q.

The following year, Chivas USA scheduled an MLS preseason game against the Columbus Crew at San Ysidro High, then canceled it 90 minutes before kickoff because of inadequate field conditions.

There has been speculation that Chivas USA, which nearly chose San Diego as its original home, is looking to move from The Home Depot Center that it shares with the higher profile Los Angeles Galaxy. And Escondido has been proposed as a potential site for the Padres’ triple-A affiliate in Portland, which, it turns out, is being displaced by an MLS expansion team.

Could Chivas USA be testing the San Diego waters again? Could the Padres be forming some sort of partnership with the MLS club to build a mid-sized, multi-use stadium?

Garfinkel and Chivas USA officials quickly tossed water on any smoldering rumors.

“There’s nothing to that,” one Chivas USA official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I can’t be emphatic enough about that.”